It’s Saturday so it’s time for a panorama. Today it is of Doctors Pond in Great Dunmow, Essex at sunset. This is an HDR image made up of 5 HDR images, each made from 5 original images, so 25 images in all (5 per portion). All stitched together in Kolor AutoPano 4.2 and then fiddled with in Lightroom and Photoshop. If you were to print it out at 100% you would need a pretty specialist printer as it would be 68 by 28 inches or 172 x 72 cm. You’d need a pretty large wall to hang it on as well 😉

There has been such a furore over the last few days about the super moon and, as an amateur photographer who follows such things, my feeds have been ram-jam full of pictures of the moon. I’ve kept away from it for the most part mainly due to the relatively poor weather we have had here over the past few days.

When i went our for my early morning walk this morning I was delighted that the heavy rain had finally moved away and left a sparkling sunrise…and the moon, still large in the sky, if not quite full anymore.

So, here you have Doctors Pond in Great Dunmow with the ex-super moon slowly setting in the background…and the ducks making a bee-line for me (they were sorely disappointed).

There’s a small pond next door to the office and I’ve seen these two moorhens popping in and out to feed on the grass. Everytime they see me they immediately dive into the cover around the pond. So this afternoon you could find me dangling out of the window taking this photograph…they were none the wiser.

It was the first night of the summer program for the Bishops Stortford Camera Club tonight. We visited some woods by Perry Green where there have been plenty of bluebells, however the vast majority are well past their best so we made do with Brian setting himself on fire as a prelude to next weeks sparks evening.

I had an hour and a half spare this afternoon so had a look on Google Maps and found a couple of small lakes/large ponds just up the road and decided to go and find them. I parked up and set off across a large field to a small wood where the ponds were…alas, it was very clearly private land and the farmer had a large area fenced off for his pheasants so I decided not to take the mickey and headed back to the car.

So this building and machinery were just by where I had parked and I liked the ugliness of the building set against the lovely sky and cloud formations.

I visited the old church at Chickney this afternoon and took some long exposure shots as the clouds were nipping by at a good pace…I wasn’t satisfied with the pictures I was getting so popped inside and shot that for a while. Thing is, I’ve photographed this church a few times now and I really wasn’t getting anything new so I decided to have a look at the back of the Church and found a path through a field of growing wheat. I wandered off and found myself at this lovely small boating pond and set up to shoot some long exposures here.

As tends to happen a lady soon arrived wanting to know what I was up to, turns out I’d wandered onto private land. The lady was very nice about it and was happy for me to carry on and I’m really grateful that she did as I got this cracker.

I’ve included the colour version as well which has a completely different feel to it – let me know in the comments which one you prefer.

If you’re wondering the shot was taken with my 10 stop ND filter along with a 0.6 ND grad filter for the sky. This gave a 2 minute exposure time.

Well, it’s new to me ;-). Followers of my 365 project will have seen a number of shots of Doctor’s Pond over the last 8 months or so. I took a stroll up Beaumont Hill heading out of Dunmow and saw a public footpath sign I hadn’t seen before, followed it and found this pond that I had no idea existed:

Tuesday night is Bishops Stortford Camera Club night and we were due to complete a photowalk around Hatfield Heath. Unfortunately the rain arrived and the meeting was moved to the pub…but I still needed to get my daily photo. So I visited the area of the photowalk and caught this. The pond was only dug out over the winter so the amount of growth that has occurred since then is amazing. There are plenty of ducks and rabbits around as well and a couple of information points promise many other wildlife too…